The ReadWriteWeb team will be live today for a 45-minute discussion about the year's best products and biggest trends. You can listen to the show at noon today on Blog Talk Radio . We will post the recording after the live event. Show Details: RWW Live Special: 2009 Year in Review Time: Noon PST, (GMT -8) Link: http://www.blogtalkradio.com/readwriteweb Sponsor
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ReadWriteWeb Live: 2009 Year in Review (Today at Noon PST)
Since 1995 , when Sears mistakenly printed NORAD' s phone number in its catalog instead of the number of its Santa hotline, NORAD has offered an online Santa tracker during the holidays. Now, working together with Google, NORAD continues to offer the same service during the holidays. Starting at 2pm ET on Christmas Eve, the newly enhanced Santa Tracker will go live. Sponsor This year, Google will use the Google Earth plugin to power noradsanta.org . According to Google, over 8 million people used the site to track Santa in 2008. In addition, Google also now offers a mobile site ( m.noradsanta.org) . In keeping with the times, NORAD also offers a Twitter account this year where "you can keep up with news about Santa's flight." Discuss
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A New Holiday Tradition: Track Santa Online
'Tis the season and all that, and this time of year I find myself thinking a lot about my parents. This is exactly the sort of thing they'd have said (if my childhood had been, oh, 20 or 30 years later), and it would have driven me CRA-ZEE. Funny thing: It's also exactly the sort of thing I find myself saying to my own kids. Sponsor And speaking of 'tis the season, thanks and all the best to all of you who've read, tweeted, forwarded and commented on Noise to Signal this year. Have a great holiday if you're celebrating, and just have a lovely week or two if you aren't. I'll see you in 2010. More Noise to Signal. Discuss
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Cartoon: Don't Push Me
At the close of a whiz-bang year, OpenID has a lot to be proud of. With a community of 9 million sites that use OpenID logins and 1 billion individual users, OpenID has effectively revolutionized the way we are able to create and maintain portable identities. Best of all, it's not just bloggers and geeks who sang OpenID's praises: The U.S. federal government got on board this year, too. Sponsor OpenID accounts are enabled by such providers as AOL, Blogger, Flickr, Google, LiveJournal, MySpace, Verisign, WordPress and Yahoo with announcements of upcoming OpenIDs from Microsoft and PayPal. Sites that allow users to login with OpenID range from major retailers and music labels to news organizations and social sites. As for the government, at the Gov 2.0 Summit in Washington, DC, earlier this year, the General Services Administration and several government agencies announced they would adopt OpenID as part of the White House's Open Government Initiative. Participating companies included Yahoo!, PayPal, Google, Equifax, AOL, VeriSign, Acxiom, Citi, Privo and Wave Systems. On the government side is the Center for Information Technology (CIT), National Institutes of Health (NIH), U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), and related agencies. Not only is the government's involvement a vote of confidence for OpenID's innovation; it also speaks to the product's security progress, which was spearheaded by security committee head and PayPal exec Andrew Nash. In addition to developing and spreading the OpenID product, there's also the OpenID Foundation, which appointed its first executive committee, including Chris Messina and Don Thibeau, in 2009. Portable identity is one of our favorite themes from this year, and we applaud what OpenID has been able to accomplish. What do you look forward to seeing from the product, the foundation and OpenID partner sites in the year to come? Let us know your thoughts in the comments. Discuss
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OpenID Ends 2009 With 1 Billion Users
YouTube posted its year in review stats this morning and Susan Boyle's singing performance was listed as the most popular video of the year. That video was, in fact, almost four times as popular as numbers two through five - videos including David After the Dentist , that insipid wedding dance and the trailer for the vampire movie New Moon . With more than 120 million views, Boyle's video demonstrates a lot of things about YouTube, now one of the world's largest search engines. It's an inspiring video that challenges expectations about gender and age with a story of personal triumph. It's also something that traditional media pulled off better than user generated content probably could have. Sponsor The video has had embedding turned off on YouTube but it's really quite compelling. It's embarrassing to see how people talk down to an older woman, whose appearance falls outside of television's definition of beauty. It's moving to see her triumph in the performance. It's bittersweet to consider that the television franchise souped up the video of her performance, turning a woman worthy of respect into a freak because of her beautiful, youthful voice and profiting handsomely while she went on to have psychological issues because of the resulting public pressure. That's what people on the Internet watched this year, though. That and a small child speaking under the influence of dental medication. Discuss
The Twitterati have spoken! Throughout 2009, a few tech topics got so much attention that they managed to make Twitter's trends. Google Wave was one of the most notable of these, obviously, but what were the other subjects of such interest to Twitter-using geeks? Twitter has just released a list of the top 10 technology-related trending topics of the year; here's what tweeps have been talking about. Sponsor 1. Google Wave The most-talked-about app of the year - on Twitter and likely in many other circles, was Google Wave. As invitations rolled out in waves, each initiate was given a limited number of invites to pass on to friends and colleagues. This left the twittersphere clamoring for Wave invites and drove the keyword into Twitter's general trending topics on multiple occasions. If Wave did nothing else right, they certainly mastered the art of the viral marketing campaign. 2. Snow Leopard Apple fanboys (and girls) the world around rejoiced when the newest Mac operating system was released this year. Snow Leopard was announced at Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference in June 2008, which meant that Mac geeks had been waiting to buy their copies for more than a year by the time the OS hit shelves in August of this year. 3. Tweetdeck This Twitter app became wildly successful this year and made tech headlines for its Facebook and LinkedIn integration, its iPhone app (a strong competitor to challenge Tweetie 2), its themed interfaces, and more. 4. Windows 7 The longsuffering Windows users among us had long been suffering when Windows 7 was released this year. Better, smarter, faster and less buggy, the OS promised to be the answer to our prayers and a reason to hold our heads up in front of Mac users. Windows also had an interesting marketing campaign that kept their OS on the tips of tongues - and the top of trends - for several months running. 5. CES The Consumer Electronics Show, held each year in Las Vegas, is a gadget geek's version of the AVN Awards, also held each year in Las Vegas. Coincidence? Most definitely. 6. Palm Pre Several years ago, geeks fell in love with the Treo. Then Palm devices kind of fell off the face of the earth and out of public favor until this year, when the company released the tiny touchscreen device known as the Pre. The first iteration of the device hasn't yet become overwhelmingly popular, but the Pre definitely has its fans. 7. Google Latitude In 2005, location-based app Dodgeball was bought by Google. The Dodgeball creators went on to make Foursquare, and this year, Google replaced Dodgeball with Latitude, which very simply shows you where your friends are on Google Maps. Latitude could be the basis for more tricky applications in the future, but location tech in general can be a difficult technology to master. 8. #E3 Another yearly holy-grail-of-its-industry conference, E3, the Electronic Entertainment Expo, is held in Los Angeles. This con is where gamer geeks die and go to heaven. 9. #amazonfail Amazon suffered public criticism this year when certain gay and lesbian books were removed from sales rankings for containing adult content. The trouble was, most of the titles in question weren't "adult" in nature at all, leading media and the general public to the conclusion that Amazon execs were deeply and terribly homophobic. In the end, it turned out that a single Amazon employee in France set a Boolean flag on adult content from False to True, taking out 57,000 books in his wake. Whoopsie! 10. Macworld And finally, there was MacWorld. Steve Jobs was unable to make the event, and Apple announced that the 2009 con would be the last year the company would participate in the show. The company announced a few modest treats, including new versions of iLife and iWork, as well as a 17-inch MacBook. Apple further announced that music sold on iTunes would be DRM-free. And that's it for Twitter's top trends! Do you think the right topics got the most attention? What do you think would have been trend #11? Let us know your thoughts in the comments! Discuss
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Twitter's Top 10 Tech Trends of 2009
We've all heard security nerds complain about the vulnerabilities of cloud computing; here's the news they've been waiting for. Black-hat hackers got into an unnamed website hosted on Amazon's servers then proceeded to install an illegal command and control infrastructure. Named America's number one most wanted botnet, Zeus was discovered on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) by security researchers yesterday. Sponsor The Zeus Trojan is a keylogger designed to steal data such as login credentials, account numbers and credit card information. It creates fake HTML forms on banking login pages to allow hackers to steal user data. This particular botnet has been linked to around $100 million in bank fraud in 2009. Although we don't yet have details on exactly how the website in question was hacked, we have learned that the software has been removed from the Amazon cloud. This incident is the first example of malware being found on AWS' infrastructure. As we were warned by black hats in April this year, cloud computing carries certain risks and opportunities for exploitation. Our own Sarah Perez wrote: In another part of the Sensepost presentation, they looked specifically at vulnerabilities of Amazon's Web Services. To start off, they detailed the process involved in setting up a new instance on EC2... While Amazon has provided 47 machine images they built themselves, the remaining 2721 images were build by other EC2 users. Can you really believe that all of these images were built securely? Basically, the template directory is just a big archive of user-generated content. And you know what user-gen content is like... risky . As John Pescatore told the Financial Times , "The security of these cloud-based infrastructure services is like Windows in 1999. It's being widely used and nothing tremendously bad has happened yet. But it's just in early stages of getting exposed to the Internet, and you know bad things are coming." Will hackers continue to employ web services to carry out their schemes in 2010? Twitter, Facebook, Google Apps, and now Amazon Web Services have all been used for evil this year. How can websites, corporations, and end users be smarter about online security to avoid personal and financial loss next year? Let us know what you think in the comments. Discuss
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Bank Login-Stealing Botnet Found Hiding in Amazon Cloud